TRAGIC YEAR CAN`T HALT THE URGE TO CLIMB

The high country is closed by cold and snow until May, and alpinists in the Pacific Northwest Cascade range are looking back on a disastrous 1986 climbing season in which 11 lives were lost.

Nine members of a private school`s climbing party died in May on Mt. Hood outside Portland, Ore., and two men were killed in an ice fall on Mt. Baker near here in August.

But the presence of the mountains, in full sight of downtown Portland, Tacoma, Everett, Seattle, Salem and Eugene, provides a lure that no chain of climbing tragedies seems to overcome. Stimson Bullitt, a lawyer in Seattle who did not begin serious mountain climbing until he was 50, said:

''The mountains are reachable with challenging climbs. The playing fields are there. There are complex motives about facing risks, and the suicidal ones have short climbing careers, but the prudent ones last for decades.''

Phil Ershler, one of the many world-class climbers who live in the Pacific Northwest, says that ''seeing the mountains all year draws people out.'' Ershler, a veteran who has climbed Mt. Everest, has reached the top of 14,410-foot Mt. Rainier 260 times and works as a guide on the mountain.

''A lot of the clients we get are people who sat in their office in Seattle and stared out at Rainier and said, `Damn, I`ve got to get atop that thing,` '' he said.

An impulse similar to that might have led three young novice climbers and their 23-year-old guide to a snow field on Mt. Baker, a 10,778-foot peak, also in the Cascades. An ice fall engulfed them Aug. 3.

Steve Raschick, 20, a student at Seattle Pacific University, and Ian Kraabel, the guide and son of Paul Kraabel, a Seattle city councilman, were swept into a crevasse and killed. After a day of searching, rescue workers gave up because of the danger that more ice would fall from the cliff above them.

Tom Waller, 19, with broken ribs, a collapsed lung and damaged shoulder, and Kurt Petellin, 21, with a dislocated shoulder, survived because they were able to stay on top of the flow of ice chunks. Other climbers rescued them. Petellin said later that he and his companions had paid Kraabel, an experienced climber, $175 to ''show us the ropes.''

The Mt. Hood climb on May 12, in which nine people died from the cold, was sponsored by a private high school as a part of its curriculum required for graduation. A critique by a group of alpinists said bad judgment on the part of the people leading the climb was to blame for the Mt. Hood disaster. The critique said the leaders should have turned back when the weather became bad. A search party found the bodies in a pile in a shelter.

''Mountain climbing is a dangerous sport,'' said Richard Hoffmann, recreation officer of the Mt. Hood National Forest. ''If you made it so safe for everybody to get up there, you`d have a lot more fatalities because people wouldn`t recognize the risk.''

Park rangers say about 5,000 people a year try to climb Mt. Baker, and about half reach the summit. Most of them use the same route where disaster befell the four young men in August.

The worst accident in United States alpine history occurred at the 11,300-foot level of Mt. Rainier in 1981, when 11 people died in an ice fall. National park records list 49 deaths of Mt. Rainier climbers.

Lou Whittaker opened Rainier Mountaineering, a guide service in Rainier National Park, in 1951. That year 300 people climbed the mountain. In 1985, of the about 7,500 people who started the climb, 4,016 reached the top, making Mt. Rainier the second most-climbed mountain in the U.S. Mt. Hood-- 11,280 feet high and 200 miles south of here near Portland--is climbed by 10,000 people a year and is No. 1 in the U.S.